Restoring Civic Attachment in Our Young People

Democracy requires well-informed citizens, with the habits and mind-set required to maintain a free and self-governing society. Teachers, in turn, are key to establishing those habits of heart and mind on which democracies rely. As such, teachers benefit from exposure to professional development (PD) opportunities that refresh and augment their knowledge and classroom skills in the area of civics.

But education officials and policymakers face a host of competing priorities, and support for professional development in civics has has been limited. One crucial consequence is the lack of research regarding current civics PD programs. Accordingly, the AEI Program on American Citizenship set out to survey the providers of civics PD, delving into their purposes, methods, and views to create a first-ever overview of PD in civics.

This study revolves around an essential question: what is the nature and range of PD for secondary civics teachers in the United States? Our aim is to reveal a portrait of current practice through a combination of interviewing and surveying current civics PD providers and through reviewing the current literature on high-quality PD.

Citizenship education among American youth ought to be studied more systematically, more thoroughly, and with greater resources than it is at present. With that premise, the objective of this report is to outline what a full-fledged study of civic education among US high school students would require.

The particular focus in this report is on research that can inform policymakers about what public policies affect the quality of civic education. This specific focus is warranted because, to date, civic education receives far more lip service than meaningful attention within the education policy community…Simply put, there is much we do not know about the consequences of policies regarding civics. Does including civics among graduation requirements affect young people’s civic knowledge? Does the inclusion of civics among tested subjects in high-stakes exams help or hinder civic education? Do charter or magnet schools provide qualitatively different—whether better or worse—civic education than traditional public schools? These are the types of basic questions that we do not yet know how to answer.

In sharp contrast to the large literature on assessments’ effects regarding math and reading, very few studies have examined what effect, if any, statewide assessments in civics and related subjects have on civic education. And to the extent that there has been any research on state-level policies regarding civic education—including but not limited to assessments—these studies have concluded that these policies have no discernible effect on civic attitudes and behavior.[5] Yet these studies are few, so notwithstanding their null findings, this paper proceeds from the premise that the issue is not yet settled and thus poses the question anew: do civics assessments matter for civic education?

Being a Part of a People: Ridgeview Charter Schools and Civic Education By William Gonch (February 25, 2014)

Early on a crisp Thursday morning at Colorado’s Ridgeview Classical Schools, eighth-graders in Mr. Binder’s American Literature class are presenting on Benjamin Franklin. The students have read the first and second parts of Franklin’s Autobiography, and today they are speaking about Franklin’s “table of virtues,” the famous passage in which he selects 13 virtues he hopes to develop by tracking his progress, each day, in practicing them.

Each student explicates particular aspects of Franklin’s text; all are expected to demonstrate mastery of the content. But the main emphasis of each presentation is what the students call their “virtue project.” Each student has chosen three virtues: two from Franklin’s list and one of his or her choosing. They have identified concrete actions that indicate whether they are succeeding or failing at pursuing their chosen virtues and have spent the past week tracking their actions. Each presentation describes the student’s experience: students explain why they chose their virtues, how they understand them, and how their understanding differs from Franklin’s. Then they report on their success or failure in pursuit of their virtues and answer questions from the class.

Chukwuma Isebor, an 18-year-old high school student whose father emigrated to the United States from Nigeria for college, says that prior to his senior year he was cynical and distrustful “of the government and the way it treated lower-income citizens and minorities.” Yet, there he was in December, arguing with two classmates before a panel of three judges that the patriotic spirit of the nation’s founders could be revived and the quality of American democracy improved if citizens participated more actively.

Chukwuma, Joseline Barajas, and Chyna Winchester are seniors at the César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy campus on 12th Street Southeast in Washington, DC, 11 blocks east of the Capitol. They offered up their thoughts on citizenship and democracy as they participated in the annual “We the People” competition at their school. The nationwide competition, sponsored by the Center for Civic Education, tests students’ knowledge of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights in a congressional hearing-style format. Teams research an opening statement that responds to questions on one of the competition’s six themes and then answer queries from a panel of judges. The goal of the competition is to promote knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution as the foundation of democracy in the United States.

In Service of Citizenship: YES Prep Public Schools and Civic Education
By Robert Maranto
(April 3, 2013)

The “YES” in the name of YES Prep Public Schools stands for Youth Engaged in Service. From its start as a program at Rusk Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 1995 to its opening as a single independent charter school in 1998 to its current network of 10 grade 6–12 campuses with some 600 teachers serving 6,400 students, YES Prep has emphasized citizenship through service to the community.

YES Prep is often compared to another “no-excuses” network of charter schools: the much touted Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Like KIPP, YES Prep began in the 1990s in Houston before chartering with the support of then-HISD Superintendent Rod Paige. Both networks were founded by and are still largely staffed by Teach for America (TFA) corps members. (In a survey of YES Prep social studies teachers I conducted, 61 percent reported being trained by an alternative program such as TFA, compared to 17 percent of traditional public school social studies teachers. Both charter networks are highly successful academically; YES Prep boasts a 100 percent college placement rate and high college completion rates for low-income students. Seventy-two percent of YES Prep alumni have completed college or are making progress toward that goal, compared to around 10 percent of disadvantaged students generally. Like KIPP, YES Prep serves a predominantly minority student population (86 percent Hispanic), 78 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged.

On a mid-September weekend in 2011, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times ran two starkly contrasting stories. The front page of the Tribune reported on some 1,200 Chicago public-school students commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by organizing public memorials and honoring local police and firefighters. The Sun-Times, meanwhile, brought word of activists in Massachusetts pushing to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from public-school classrooms, lest students suffer undue thought control.

This juxtaposition is invoked by Juan Rangel, CEO of the UNO Charter School Network, with a purposeful mix of pride and exasperation. Pride, because UNO’s students—almost all children of immigrants from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America—were those who made page one for commemorating 9/11. And exasperation because the worldview manifested by the Massachusetts campaign represents so much of what UNO tries to fight.

To better understand and advance the efforts of charter schools to teach citizenship, AEI’s Program on American Citizenship and its Education Policy Studies Program are working with a select group of “trendsetter” charter schools that seek to raise the bar for civic education. Building on our 2012 report, we commissioned a series of in-depth case studies exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture.

Like other charter schools, National Heritage Academies promises parents to teach a rigorous curriculum that will prepare their children for success in college. It also promises a moral education imbued with traditional values such as love of country and family. Good character is not just a private asset, NHA leaders believe. It leads to good citizenship.

On a sunny Tuesday in June, the streets of Harlem, New York City, are filled with the usual midday crowd hustling in and out of subway stations and eating hurried lunches. One thing they are most decidedly not doing is voting. And this is a disappointment for a small army of schoolchildren dressed in bright yellow shirts.

The students in yellow attend one of the charter schools in the Democracy Prep Public Schools network and, with the help of their teachers and several parent volunteers, are waging a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign. The occasion is the Democratic congressional primary for New York’s 15th Congressional District, which encompasses upper Manhattan (including Columbia University, Washington Heights, and Harlem) and surrounding locales. Congressional primaries are typically low-turnout affairs in which incumbents have a massive advantage.

Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New GenerationEdited by David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. HessHarvard Education Press, 2012

“By nearly every measure, Americans are less engaged in their communities and political activity than generations past.” So write the editors of this volume, who survey the current practices and history of citizenship education in the United States.

They argue that the current period of “creative destruction”—when schools are closing and opening in response to reform mandates—is an ideal time to take an in-depth look at how successful strategies and programs promote civic education and good citizenship.

Making Civics Count offers research-based insights into what diverse students and teachers know and do as civic actors, and proposes a blueprint for civic education for a new generation that is both practical and visionary.

Charter schools provide an intriguing opportunity to rethink the role of public schools in preparing students to become informed and engaged participants in the American political system. As public schools of choice, charter schools are freed from many rules and regulations that can inhibit innovation and improvement. They can readily adopt best practices in civic education and encourage (or even mandate) extracurricular activities to enhance civic learning. With their decentralized approach to administration, they can allow parents and students a far greater role in school governance than they would have in traditional public schools.

In exchange for that flexibility, charter schools must define a clear mission and performance outcomes for themselves. In service of their chosen missions, high-performing charters seek to forge a transformative school culture for their students—expressed in slogans on hallway placards, banners, and T-shirts, and heard in chants, ceremonies, and codes of conduct. Successful charters create a culture in which everyone associated with the school is united around a common mission, enabling them to articulate goals and aspirations that might otherwise be hampered by constituency politics and parental objections. Charter school leaders can (and do) speak forthrightly about the need to teach students good social skills, instill among their pupils a sense of community, and encourage students to make positive change in the world.

This unique autonomy coupled with a strong mission orientation would seem to be a winning combination for civic education. Yet, even as charter schooling has been at the forefront of education reform efforts, we know remarkably little about how these schools approach this critical dimension of education. What have charter schools done with the opportunity to rethink civic education? Are there lessons to be learned? Are there challenges that impede their ability to teach citizenship?

Citizenship education is lacking in public and private schools: 75 percent of high school seniors cannot name a power granted to Congress by the Constitution, fewer than half of eighth graders know the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and less than a quarter of young Americans regularly vote, according to a recent survey released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In addition, civic dialogue is becoming ever more polarized, while public service is openly disdained by many. Previous school reforms have focused on graduation rates and reading and math scores, neglecting education about citizenship and resulting in a lack of basic knowledge about issues at the core of what has made America great.

School reformers are themselves deeply engaged in powerful civic and political action: transforming American educational policy and practice. This presents an opportunity to ensure that America’s schools also focus—as they once did—on forging engaged, empowered citizens. Sponsored by AEI’s Program on American Citizenship, Frederick M. Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies; Meira Levinson, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and David E. Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, have commissioned leading researchers and scholars to explore the issues of citizenship and schooling by looking at domestic and international data, teacher training, and schools and classrooms. This research will illuminate how America’s schools can renew their focus on forging engaged and empowered citizens.

The U.S. Citizenship Test is a required step in the naturalization process. All U.S. citizenship applicants, with some exceptions, must pass the citizenship test before taking the Oath of Allegiance and officially becoming U.S. citizens. Do you have what it takes to be a citizen? Take the test after the jump.

While civics ignorance is nothing new, its causes—and possible remedies—are not so well understood. Given this paucity of research, the AEI Program on American Citizenship has set out to explore what teachers and the public think our high schools should be teaching about citizenship and whether they believe high schools are actually achieving those goals. In spring 2010, we developed and commissioned a survey, High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do, to investigate what high school social studies teachers are teaching today about citizenship.

We then administered a portion of the survey to a representative sample of one thousand American citizens as part of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We use these data in this report to make two basic comparisons. In the first section, we compare the attitudes and preferences of social studies teachers to those of the public. In the second, we break the public out into Democrats and Republicans and document important differences across those two partisan groups. The results, particularly the areas of agreement and disagreement across these various stakeholders, have implications for the teaching of citizenship in America’s high schools.

American life requires citizens who know who they are as Americans, who are knowledgably attached to their country and communities, and who possess the character—the attitudes, sensibilities, and virtues—necessary for robust civic participation. What So Proudly We Hail: Stories for Every American—an anthology edited by Leon R. Kass (AEI), Amy A. Kass (Hudson Institute), and Diana Schaub (Loyola University Maryland); ISI Books, Spring 2011— seeks to help form such citizens, using the soul-shaping possibilities of American short stories, political speeches, and patriotic songs.

Unlike other efforts to improve civic literacy and civic virtue, this approach assumes that developing robust American citizens is a matter of the heart as well as the mind, and requires more than approving our lofty principles or knowing our history and institutions. Like building character generally, making citizens requires educating the moral imagination and sentiments, and developing fitting habits of the heart—matters both displayed in and nurtured by our great works of imaginative literature and rhetoric. The readings collected in this anthology shed light on our civic character and ways, encourage thoughtful patriotic attachment, and elicit timeless aspirations for civic improvement—always with an eye on our founding commitment to freedom and equality.

PAST EVENTS

“First Among Equals: George Washington and the American Presidency,” February 17, 2012. This event will open with a reading of portions of George Washington’s Farewell Address, a selection from the anthology. A distinguished panel will then discuss Washington’s exemplary founding presidency, its lessons for the modern presidency (as well as for today’s aspiring presidential candidates), and the importance of preserving and perpetuating our political institutions.

“Why Memorial Day?” A Book Forum with Senator John McCain, May 25, 2011. Several selections in the anthology deal with the importance of civic holidays for the perpetuation of our institutions and the attachment of our citizens. This forum will introduce the book with a discussion of the meaning and importance of Memorial Day, a holiday first instituted to honor those who died in the Civil War defending the Union.

The point of departure for our discussion will be a reading of “In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire,” by Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., delivered as a defense of Memorial Day on May 30, 1884. Panelists will then discuss the speech and the meaning of Memorial Day today.

From the Daily Caller: In an election season marked by debates over the virtues of the public sector, and amidst claims by teachers’ unions and their allies that private schooling is inimical to good democratic citizenship, a new national study reports that private school teachers are at least as committed to promoting traditional notions of citizenship as their public school counterparts.

From the Weekly Standard: America’s public schools were once thought to provide the cornerstone for an informed citizenry–a citizenry made up multiple races and ethnic origins. What made “e pluribus unum” a fact was a common understanding of what rights and responsibilities we had as citizens and the role the government played in providing sound and effective self-rule. We are playing fast and loose with our future if we continue to downplay or simply ignore the role civic education plays in making citizens of us all.

From the Washington Examiner: As fans of late-night host Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street interviews know, Americans suffer from a national epidemic of civic ignorance. But just because more Americans can identify the three judges on “American Idol” than the three branches of government doesn’t mean it’s all their fault. It’s an indictment of the way civics is taught in our high schools, according to a new survey, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do.”

When researchers Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett asked over 1,000 randomly selected high school social studies teachers about the state of civic education today, they found that not only are these teachers skimping on facts, they’re giving short shrift to fundamental concepts about American history and government.